October 28th, 2005

hi!!

Shopping in rain is a great experience, especially when all routes from ashok nagar to tnagar is flooded. Just on the spur of the moment myself and 1 of my friends decided to go shopping for deepavali because of 2 reasons.

1. TNagar wouldn’t be crowded today.2. We can go splash..splash.. in rain water all the way to tnagar.

Nothing to stop us, we made our way to the shopping hub of chennai. As expected, there was nothing in sight expect some 2 or 3 autorichshaws & some die-hard shoppers who were in the same mind set as me ;-). In most places, we waded & literally swam across in knee deep water. The rain had started coming down heavily, thankfully i was covered….

Going thro’ the waters, the fastest mode of transport was the newspaperwalla tricycle and walking. After enjoying for more than an hours walk, we reached a place called duraisamy subway, the main link between Tnagar and the western side of the city. The subway was 95% submerged in H2O…..

Gosh!!! what a site it was to see a diesel auto half submerged in the subway. Water had already started to seep in thro’ the door & the driver was struggling. But anyway, we had to move. So we took a snap of that in my friend’s mobile & left for Tnagar. It was 5 minutes away & we were beginning to sense victory because the Pothys logo was visible. After another 15 mins of wading, we managed to reach Mount Everest (Tnagar)…

After shopping in Pothys, RmKV & Saravana Stores, we started heading back. Having tea & some hot bajjis, we saw yet another incident at the same subway. This time it was a van. Despite all the warnings of not to enter the subway, he entered the subway in full speed. He also reached the middle of it & the van stopped all of a sudden & didnt start. Watching all that, we smiled to ourselves thinking how much of a chennaite he was, “Born to break rules” even though it meant good to him.

The water that was knee deep had another grown another 10cm in the 3 hrs we shopped & started wetting my pants through the rain coat. We bundled all our clothes in 2 huge bags that we got from the shop & started floating the bags. What was the need to carry it when we were finding it difficult even to walk comfortably?? Splashing ofcourse was fun.

Another hour later, we reached home & received a sound thrashing…..yea, both of us :)). With a cup of piping hot chocolate, we narrated all our shopping experience. The 5th grade guy i told about here burst out laughing when i told him how a wave of water splashed on us when a jeep was trying to make it across the road.

On the whole, the shopping we did was something that i cant forget. This is the first time ever in my lifetime, i had shopped sooooo comfortably, dat too in Tnagar. Just for the sake, we went to Tnagar again today & my gracious God!! look at the crowd outside Saravana Stores. You would go mad just at the site of it.

October 28th, 2005

hi!! this is a continuation of the previous blog…myself & one of my friends Ram had a chat about our memories & ofcourse most of it was filled with how we played DOS games. You can read that post here. That post is a bit long.

October 25th, 2005

hi!!

This blog is about some good old memories that had been and will be with me…..

First off, my darling sunny. How many of you have used bajaj sunny. Well, we were one of the first buyers here & its been with us for the past 10 years & ya….. its still running. Some 3 days ago, i was compelled to take that vehicle out for a nearby store. & what a surprise it gave me when it started after 2 kicks. Great!!! bike oops! moped or scooter whatever…

Even today, its giving a mileage of 30kmpl & it travels at a speed of 50kmph after some struggle with the accelerator. My dad wanted to sell it last month. But i stopped saying that after another 10 years, it will become an antique & bike lovers will come after it… 😉

Second, comes my age old computer….not this 1 ofcourse!! I got my first computer during 9th grade summer holidays & what a superb configuration it had.1. 1GB of HDD.2. 8MB RAM.3. A 31/2 floppy drive4. A 51/4 floppy drive …. yes i got one with my old comp!!!5. No cdrom drive or multimedia.

Floppy drive was considered to be the most modern thing ever at that time & we used to buy DOS games in at a rate of Rs.100. Games such Dangerous Dave & Prince of Persia 1 were the most popular with us at that time. Later, after around 6 months, we upgraded our system to 32MB RAM, got a 32X cdrom drive with a multimedia set. The first cdrom game that i played was RoadRash, followed by Motoracer 2, NFS 2 and Claw. They still remain the favourites primarily because they dont use much of system resource & they are simply great!!!

Still later, that same old system ran Windows 98 & we used to be very content with playing all the games mentioned above, all in 1GB & 32 MB RAM.

Third, its the magazine Tinkle. I cant just forget the days when myself & my brother used to wait for the newspaper boy who used to deliver it. Then as usual every fortnight morning, begins the fight as to who should read it first. Thanks to Uncle Anant Pai (Tinkle Editor) who made such a superb magazine.

Its very difficult to write for kids & i realised it when i read tinkle sometime back. There was a recipe to make ice-cream & there were instructions such as, “Take help from an adult for this” and “Be careful with knife” etc…

There are ofcourse lots of memories but i will reserve them for another post.

October 21st, 2005

hi!!

The broadband is finally working & it excites to see a page load at the blinking of an eye. So gud is the excitement & feeling dat, it makes u download the whole world. As of now, there are these listings waiting to be downloaded tonight.

October 20th, 2005

hi!!

With my dataone broadband connection wrecking havoc all around, i found it too difficult to cope up with dialup :-(. But something is better than nothing ;), so i was sticking around with it & thought of some things that i had not done for the past 1 week or so.

After broadband, checking mail was part of my routine – morning once, evening once & night once, like breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now checking mail using dialup even once is becoming a nightmare. Second one was updating my blog. I was horrified by the thought that i hadnt updated it since the last 2 weeks. Third one is even worse, didnt read more than 3 dozen of offline messages that i receive. boooohoooo!!

Its sickening in dialup to see a google search webpage load at the “speed of light” for 2 minutes at 563 bytes/second. The speed also varies from 563 bytes to a blinding speed of 1.5 kbps. As far as downloads, 1 mb downloading for 5 mins 30 secs tears my nerves apart.

So, all i do is put a webpage for loading in the browser and go for a cup of coffee or choclate & come back to see to my heart-felt satisfaction, the webpage has half-loaded……..as i press ESC in frustration.

And as expected, this page too is still loading, as the rest of the posts contemplate whether to appear or not…

October 5th, 2005

hi!! Microsoft has given some very cool online courses for free[1]. Check them out and make sure you make use maximum use of them. Most of these free courses are available for download also. To view them after download, u need the Offline Player.

October 4th, 2005

This page contains a lot of freely downloadable e-Books such PHP, Ruby, Win XP for Power Users, Flash Actionscript etc. and a lot more…..Donno when the site will expire, so download all that you need immediately.

Using FDM, i have already scheduled for some downloads tonight. Dont miss this & chk it out 😉